Gore Vidal (124 page)

In what he hoped was an extralegal preemptive strike, Capote now encouraged
New York
magazine to publish what he expected would be a strongly anti-Vidal version of their “feud.” The front cover of the June 11, 1979, issue quoted the most pungent passage from Capote's interview in
Playgirl
and depicted Vidal flying over and out of the White House. The article itself, “The Vidal-Capote Papers,” was noticeably evenhanded, and Capote's still-sharp literary intelligence managed to provide some interesting though arguable comment on both the achievement and the problem of Vidal's versatility as a writer. “Gore,” he remarked, “wants to be all things to all men. I mean, he wants to be Caesar and Cleopatra at the same time, and he isn't.” The article, though, did not damage Vidal and certainly had no effect on the likelihood that within a few years Capote would have to pay huge damages and double legal fees, even a small portion of which he could not afford. “
We are willing to settle
for an apology, one dollar damages, and my legal fees … happily, deductible in the land of the litigious,” Gore told Halfpenny toward the end of the year. But “C.'s lawyers say that he has no money. There, for now, the matter rests.” Though the judge, who in August 1979 denied Capote's request for summary dismissal, also denied
Vidal's request for summary judgment, he declared that Capote's statements were, as a matter of law, libelous per se and that Vidal's attorneys had demonstrated “actual malice.” It seemed likely that unless Capote caved in, there would be a trial. His attorneys delayed and maneuvered, including a backhanded attempt to eliminate from the record Capote's self-damaging deposition. In October 1983 Capote swallowed the bitter pill. The cost of continuing was disastrous. Though only fifty-nine, he seemed aged, pale, and deathly-looking. He would apologize in writing. The question of his paying Vidal's legal fees was dropped. For some time now Vidal had been aware that at least two of his three purposes in undertaking the suit would be unrealized. “No matter what the judge determines, Mr. C. has now so muddled things as to make me seem to be his equal: a pair of publicity-mad social-climbers who make it a habit to libel and slander one another and everyone else.
Pro bono publico
is not, I suppose, possible when you have
publico
as debased as the American polity. Anyway, the expense has been formidable; the pleasure—often—intense.” Capote's letter was bittersweet vindication, even if Vidal distrusted Capote's promises: “
I apologize for any
distress, inconvenience or expense which may have been caused you as a result of the interview with me published in the September 1975 issue of
Playgirl
. As you know, I was not present at the event about which I am quoted in the interview, and I understand from your representatives that what I am reported as saying does not accurately set forth what occurred. I can assure you that the article was not an accurate transcription of what I said, especially with regard to any remarks which might cast aspersions upon your character or behavior, and that I will avoid discussing the subject in the future.”

Soon the possibility that Capote would break his word was ended, conclusively. In Rome, in April 1984, Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, whom he kept up to date on extra-Moroccan affairs with regular exchanges of letters, that a literary columnist and reviewer for
Newsweek
, Walter Clemons, who had visited him in Rome, had had a sad lunch with Capote a few weeks before. “T. seemed not to be drinking but spoke with a mouth in which the tongue (once so hummingbird-like in its dread effect) was too large and slow to shape much chat…. Those made mad by drink and pills like the Bird, does one judge them by what they did to themselves or by what they were before? It is a nice point.” Gore's anger at Capote subsided somewhat. But not his distaste and disdain. When Capote died, in late August 1984 in
Los Angeles at the home of Joanne Carson, who had remained loyal to and endlessly solicitous of her good friend, Gore told her ex-husband, Johnny Carson, that since “I knew he would be upset by Joanne's coup … I promised him that I would die in
his
house. This will even things out. He was much pleased.” Accounts of the funeral came from the eighty-year-old Christopher Isherwood, who spoke briefly at the ceremony and who had always found Capote amusing, and from Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, with whom Gore had become friendly during his recent on-again/off-again residences in Los Angeles. “
As someone said when
word broke that Elvis Presley was dead,” he wrote to Paul Bowles, Capote's death was “a good career move. T will now be the most famous American writer of the last half of the 20th century. No one will ever read a book of his again but no one who can read will be able to avoid the thousands of books his life will inspire. Since he has told the most extraordinary lies about every famous person of our time, the hacks will have a field-day recording the sorts of lies
they
usually make up. T's affair with Camus, T's help in getting Marilyn aborted, T's blow job of Pres Kennedy…. Well, he is what this vulgar tinny age requires. RIP.”

When, in late October 1977, on his way to California, Gore had flown into New York from Rome with Howard and his new literary agent, Owen Laster, Norman Mailer had not been particularly on his mind. But as with Capote and Vidal, they had become for one another countermeasuring rods of self-identity. Though they had not spoken since 1971, their so-called feud had the reality of each one's constantly rewriting a brief against the other, which they often inflicted on friends. And the press eagerly printed almost every offhand hostile comment each made to journalists. Mailer felt achingly unfulfilled and dissatisfied with himself about his attack on Vidal on the Cavett show. Mickey Knox, Mailer's friend, of whom Gore and Howard saw much in Rome, preferred to avoid the subject with Gore. He liked and admired Gore, and Gore, as always, was generous with invitations and attempts to further Knox's acting career. Just before Vidal published the Miller-Manson-Mailer essay in 1971 he had called Knox to the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment. “He said he wanted to show me something and he showed me the piece … and I read it and said, ‘Gore, I wouldn't publish this.' ‘Why not?' ‘Why not! I don't have to tell you why not.' ‘Well, you
know, it's just a progression. That's all it is.' I don't know what the hell he ever fucking meant by that, frankly. All through the years he kept saying, ‘I don't know what all the fuss was about. It's just a progression.' But you put Manson there in the middle. It's a problem. Let's face it.” Thereafter the subject was unavoidable. Mickey's real presence inevitably evoked the phantom Norman. “I'd go to Ravello or wherever Gore was and we'd sit up till four in the morning drinking. And only talking about Norman. There I was, his surrogate, defending him. About everything: ‘He can't write, he can't read.' At a certain point Howard would stand up and say, ‘I've heard this before. I've had enough!' And he'd go off to bed and leave me with Gore. It was endless…. It went on and on. I kept saying, ‘You're crazy. You two guys ought to make up,' and he kept saying, ‘Never! Never! Never!'”

Soon after settling in at the Plaza, Gore and Howard went from a dinner party at which Princess Margaret was the guest of honor to a large party hosted by Lally Weymouth, a writer and journalist and the daughter of Katharine Graham, the
Washington Post
publisher. Weymouth had invited seventy guests to a buffet dinner in honor of Lord Weidenfeld, the British publisher who had recently established himself in New York, and fifty additional guests for drinks afterward. Following her flight from London, Princess Margaret was too tired to attend. But Weidenfeld's power and Weymouth's social connections had created a glamorous guest list: CBS's William Paley was there; Jackie Kennedy (now Onassis); the British ambassador Peter Jay; Marella Agnelli; Katharine Graham; Jerry Brown; John Kenneth Galbraith; Joseph Alsop; Lillian Hellman; William Styron; Susan Sontag; Gay Talese; Jason Epstein; Clay Felker, the
Esquire
editor; Mort Janklow, the lawyer-agent; Pete Hamill, the writer; Max Palevsky, the high-level Democratic fund-raiser and power broker from California; and, among others, even Sue Mengers and Sam Spiegel. When Gore and Howard arrived at about 11 P.M., the rooms of the large apartment were crowded with guests. Aware that Jackie would be there, Howard, Gore recalled, thought “I should make up with Jackie and this was the night when it was going to happen.” Lally Weymouth asked Gore, “‘Do you want to say hello to her?' ‘No,' I said, ‘I'll stay here, and if she wants to talk, she can come on in here.'” Weymouth went to the kitchen. Mailer was talking with Onassis. His companion, Norris Church, came to tell him that Gore had arrived. Mailer went into the living room to find Vidal. He walked directly toward him. Norris went with him. Sitting on a couch at one end of the room, Gore
saw him coming and rose to meet him. Accounts differ as to the dialogue. Mailer's day-after account: “I said to Vidal, ‘You look like a Jewish socialist,' which is to be differentiated from a socialist Jew. The former is a way of twitting him; the latter would be anti-Semitic. You see, years ago, Vidal used to refer to me as a ‘Jewish socialist.'” Mailer's account twenty years later: “‘You look like an old socialist.” Vidal's account: “Mailer said, ‘You look like an old Jew.' So I said in my wittiest repartee, ‘Well, Norman, you look like an old Jew, too.'” All the contemporary reports from observers agree that Mailer said either “Jew” or “Jewish,” though clearly it was an attempt at hostile humor, not anti-Semitism. Mailer denies the use of either word. “He said later that I said to him, ‘You look like an old Jewish socialist,' which was so fucking clever of him, to turn things around, as if I were an anti-Semite.”

Contemporary accounts of what then happened differ. As the ten seconds of dialogue ended, Mailer apparently threw the contents of his glass at Vidal's face, hitting him with the liquor and ice cubes. Mailer's recent comment: “Well, it's hard to hit someone cold. I was trying to work myself up to hit him. I was getting psyched up to fight. But the fact is that I was on the warpath strategically, not physically. So I couldn't hit him. But what I did was to throw my drink and ice cubes at him. He reported later that he saw a small fist coming at him…. But it was the drink and the ice cubes. Frustrated, I raised my arm and I threw the liquor glass down at him and hit him on the head with it. He must have been stunned and maybe blacked out for a second. It certainly would have given him a cut or at least a welt. This whole thing took about fifteen seconds.” Vidal's account: “He threw the contents of the glass in my face and said to the press that it was an old street fighter's trick, to blind the other person. He then followed with what he thought would be a punch but he still had the glass in his hand. So what he does is hit my upper lip with the glass in his hand. Mind you, he's way down here. I'm much taller, and the glass goes across my lip. It doesn't do much damage, but I bite the inside and get some blood coming down from inside.” As they faced one another, Mailer grabbed Vidal by the arm. Vidal grabbed Mailer's lapel and shirt front with both hands, Mailer gripping tightly, leaving bruise marks that remained for weeks, Vidal shaking Mailer, attempting to break loose his hold on his arm. For a moment they could have been perceived as being in an energetic embrace. By this time people were aware that there was a fight in progress. Those closest to the combatants had
seen the scuffle. Lally Weymouth came from the kitchen to find “two guys punching each other out in my living room…. I didn't know who was hitting whom. Needless to say I was not thrilled to be having a fistfight at my party, and when I saw what was happening, I said, ‘God, this is so awful; somebody do something,' and Clay Felker said, ‘Shut up, this fight is making your party!'” Janklow, who was talking to Hamill and Felker, rushed over to try to separate the two. So did Howard. Gore shook Mailer's grip loose from his arm and shoved him away. Mailer stumbled into Palevsky, who spilled his glass of champagne over Weymouth's dress. Sam Spiegel went immediately to Mailer to try to convince him not to rush back toward Vidal, which he seemed about to do. “People almost immediately separated us,” Mailer recalls. Vidal went toward the far side of the room, where, seated on the couch he'd been on when Mailer came toward him, Sue Mengers dabbed at the blood on his lip with a handkerchief. Jackie Onassis stood in the doorway watching.

From his side of the room Mailer challenged Vidal to come downstairs with him and have it out in the street. “Howard came up to me,” Mailer recalls, “and said he would fight for Gore. I said, ‘My fourteen-year-old son could take you.' Howard never forgave me for that remark.” According to Vidal, Mailer “made several passes and said, ‘Let's go outside and settle this!' Then Howard chased him out: ‘Fuckin' asshole loser!'” Gore's “nothing but a mouth,” Mailer insisted. Jason Epstein said, “Norman, grow up!” Mailer turned to Lally Weymouth and said, “Either he goes or I do.” When she refused to ask either of them to leave, Mailer stormed out, with Norris. As he sat on the couch, stanching the blood on his lip, Gore turned and saw Jackie in the doorway watching him. He turned away. When he turned back in her direction, she was gone. The postmortems and the press war began immediately, and the funny comments. “Frankly, after speaking to both combatants,” Janklow remarked, “I consider the incident to be one of the great moments of modern literature.” Gore, who had already been booked for a Dick Cavett show taping the next day, used a portion of his airtime jokingly to belittle Mailer's aggression. Mailer recalls that he immediately “went to Cavett with a lawyer because of Gore's libelous remarks. We settled it by Cavett giving us each a half hour, back to back I think,” which Mailer insisted on. Cavett recalls that he called Mailer and invited him to view the tape of Vidal's interview. “
Poor Norman
,” Gore soon wrote to Ned Bradford, who was now Mailer's editor at Little, Brown, “‘wrote' all
the accounts of the 28 second punch and shove (he landed on top of Max Palevsky some eight feet away from me). But the battle report was filed by yr. author with every gossip columnist in town in order to make it appear (a) there was a battle (b) he was the victor. He may yet return to fiction full-time and cut yr. losses.” Soon, in California, Gore referred to the experience as “the night of the small fists.” Russell Baker wrote a column in the
Times
about the literary rivals the bloodthirsty Henry James had beaten up. But “James finally retired from pugilism after Edith Wharton knocked him out for 35 minutes with her famous powder-puff uppercut during a chance meeting at Alice Roosevelt's coming-out party.”